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Kunstler: “What Am I Doing?” He Asks

By James Howard Kunstler
October 22, 2021

If you want a picture of things converging toward an unfortune outcome, imagine “Joe Biden” playing chicken with the future of the nation. Trouble is, the future is a very big thing — so big, you can’t see where it ends — while “Joe Biden” is one mere mortal, small and feeble… and the old jalopy he’s driving looks like it’s veering off the road….

The net effect is that life will go on in ways as-yet-undetermined upon this land-mass between the great oceans, but the vehicle “Joe Biden” is driving will end up a smoldering wreck, upside down in a drainage ditch with the phragmites and discarded Bud Lite cans. The passengers in the back seat are the economy and the social order of the USA, lying motionless with eyes Xed out in the twisted wreckage.

Ol’ White “Joe” did a “Town Hall” performance Thursday night, staged to demonstrate that he was in command of things, with a roster of carefully-vetted ringers chosen to pitch him softball questions on events du jour. Whose idea was that? And what sort of desperation prompted it? Answer No. 1: the claque of puppeteers watching the death-spiral of their wicked schemes to consolidate power forever; and No.2: a manifold collapse of the scaffold barely holding up something that resembles normal life in the USA.

The Leader of the Free World wandered the stage, sometimes oddly circling his interlocutor, Anderson Cooper of CNN, who had to step in and rescue the maundering “Joe B,” when he lost himself in thickets of talking points that no amount of rehearsal could avail to untangle. “What am I doing?” he asked more than once, but no one on the scene volunteered to remind him. The “president” frequently assumed poses that signified some kind of gross cognitive dysfunction: head turned down to the floor with his eyes shut… strange, mincing steps in the direction of a fugitive thought… fists balled like a two-year-old resisting some simple instruction… There was a robotic quality to the act, too, as “JB” repeated his place-holder phrase “Here’s the deal” to preface each flight into the murky jargon of Build Back Better.

It fell short of convincing anyone about who was in charge of the nation’s affairs at a very sketchy moment in history, and at the end Ol “Joe” just ran down like a three-dollar gyroscope. In his most lost moments, such as when AC inaptly tried to prompt him on the border crisis — “I guess I should go down,” he admitted dolefully — the “POTUS” directed the cameras to his wife in the audience, saying, “Jill’s been down there!” We were supposed to conclude that she’d fixed all that for us.

The exercise was also obviously designed to turn up the heat on the two renegade senators, Joe Manchin (WVA) and Kyrsten Sinema (AZ) who are disinclined to vote for the trillions of dollars in pending proposed legislation to drop money from helicopters all over the land and save the economy — and impose all manner of janky surveillance measures and vote-rigging scams on the country. The Obama-led claque behind all the White House fakery wants to cram this down the country’s craw before things go so far south that Americans start to think they’re living in Tierra del Fuego.

I doubt that the Townhall stunt helped on that, and then there is the crucial Governor’s race in the Beltway state of Virginia, where swaybacked Democrat war-horse Terry McAuliffe made the possibly fatal error — in a state tormented by school-board politics — of saying, “Parents shouldn’t tell schools what to teach.” You can’t overstate how damaging that utterance was to the whole Woke Democrat hustle. All that monkey business is in the rumble seat of the jalopy that Joe Biden is driving into the ditch.

The public’s view of this panoramic debacle is apt to flip starkly in the days ahead as five years of mind-fuckery ends in this national drunken driving incident. China may postpone the Evergrande unwind a few weeks longer, but its economy is foundering on the more fundamental energy quandary — it doesn’t have enough fossil fuels to run the joint — and there’s no prospect the situation will improve, meaning that the world will get less of all of the stuff that China was making. In short, Globalism is winding down, and standards of living are sinking with that. The capital markets are gravid with terror over it.

Meanwhile, the West is seeing the first signs that the Covid-19 vaccines it went cuckoo for may be producing a strange phenomenon of “excess mortality” around the world. Suspiciously higher rates of heart attacks, vascular disorders, cancer, and other bad stuff. It’s downright spooky. In Scotland, for instance, the vaccination rate is 87 percent and weekly deaths are up 30 percent. Pandemic reporter Alex Berenson said on TV that non-Covid-19 deaths were significantly higher everywhere, and he mused out loud that there was some connection between this and the vaccines. Uh oh.

Social media, network media, and legacy print media do not want that story getting around. Some of the most deranged Wokesters across this land greeted the debut of the mRNA vaccines like a holy jubilee of salvation (and still do!). What happens in their psyches when the darn thing bites them in the ass? There’s a fair chance we’re going to find out, and soon.

https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/what-am-i-doing-he-asks/